The Future of Feminism, Perhaps?

Abstract

Western philosophies have traditionally equated woman with lack, the not-all, that which is not, and she has been regarded in negative binary terms, where man is light, reason, culture, mind, and woman is night, intuition, nature, and body. Feminist studies, from their inception, have resisted these categories and have tried to respond to masculinist definitions of what a woman is. Understandably, feminism is wary of concepts such as the body and nature for they seem to instantiate traditional visions of both woman and gender, biologically and socially constructed identities. However, my aim is to highlight the importance of recovering the place of nature and of our immersion in nature within feminist studies and, from the perspective of philosophies of life, to rethink embodiment and identity politics beyond postmodern frameworks. To think about feminism’s future in connection with its past failures and achievements, we need to examine humanity’s most fundamental context: its place within life. In order to do so, I follow the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, and Friedrich Nietzsche in exploring how theories of life can enhance feminist epistemologies with an ontology of difference that conceives of new social and political relations and identities. I contend that matter, as the expression of life, and corporeality, as the expression of difference, can help us redefine woman, feminism, and humanism in relation to a world environmentally, economically, and geopolitically in crisis.